Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

Ok, long story coming up. Please bear with me...

Our MDM certificate expired. The boss had it on his calendar for renewal, but last year renewed it a couple weeks early, and forgot to change the calendar entry, so it expired...

So we created a new one, and manually re-enrolled all of our 200 iPads into Meraki -- we made sure the Meraki Systems Manager app was up-to-date, scanned in the bar-code to install the Meraki Profile, and everything seemed to go well...

Now, suddenly, two weeks later, our apps won't update... I needed to update one of our apps, and if I push that update to any Meraki-controlled device, BOTH our apps disappear!!! They appear for a very brief second, and then they simply disappear!

I have googled this issue, and the only thing I can find is that the profile restrictions are set wrong. So I created a profile with NO restrictions, installed Meraki onto a single iPad with that profile, and STILL the apps will not install.

So I'm thinking maybe there's suddenly an issue with the certificates for the apps somehow? The cert for one of the apps expires in a month anyway, so I figured I'd go ahead and revoke all my certs and re-do everything from scratch for both apps.

But then I noticed - NONE of our devices are registered in the "devices" section of our Apple Enterprise account manager? Did we need to do that? Or is that only for testing? Because we *do* have several test devices registered in there -- devices that we *do not* use Meraki on, but are only used for debugging/testing before we distribute the apps...

So, it all boils down to this: Do I need to register all our devices on our Apple Enterprise account in order for Meraki to work? Or is there something else I must do, like using Apple Configurator? Will Meraki work without Apple Configurator?

I'm just very confused as to why nothing is working anymore -- and all of the sudden, even though we've changed nothing. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions.

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

I destroyed all the certs on my Enterprise account, and re-did them from scratch. Now my Enterprise apps are installing normally. I have no idea why that worked, but it did.

I had to get Apple involved, because somewhere along the line, my app IDs got associated with a "free" developer account somehow, and XCode wouldn't automatically sign my apps with the appropriate account -- only this "free" account, which I don't remember creating. Apple had to delete the app IDs from that "free" account and then XCode would finally sign them properly, using the proper, paid-for Enterprise account. It took Apple a couple of days to do that...

Anyway, all I can tell you is that it was definitely a certificate issue. There is no logical reason for this cert issue to crop up -- the certs didn't expire for a couple of months. But deleting all my certs, and all my provisioning profiles fixed the problem for me.

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

Well, to my knowledge we're not using VPPs for anything -- all the apps we run on our devices are our in-house Enterprise apps that I've written... These are the apps that are uninstalling themselves immediately after installing themselves.

Someone at some point in the past *did* in fact put a VPP account on our MDM setup page. That certificate had expired, so I downloaded a new one from our Apple VPP account and uploaded it to our Meraki account.

It had no effect -- same exact "install-then-uninstall" behavior, unfortunately.

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

If you're distributing enterprise apps, then you need to either have the individual devices included in the provision profile, or sign them with the enterprise distribution cert which will allow install on any device.

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

Which is why I thought maybe I should revoke and re-do all the certs on my Enterprise account, because XCode has been giving me weird warnings about bad certs -- when I debug programs, I *must* choose "Have XCode manage Certs automatically", but when I build for Enterprise Release I *must* manually select the cert from my computer...

Problem is, there are about 40 iPads that are currently working -- they haven't received the latest app-update. If I revoke all my certs, those apps will stop working. And *if* my issue is *not* this certificate issue, then I've just killed the last remaining 40 iPads we have that are still working... So I'm *really* hesitant to do this...

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

Hey Lawrence,

What you've described is similar to something that we see with some frequency in the run-up to a new major version of iOS: that iOS no longer likes the code signature of your apps. If you collect console logs off of a client manifesting the problem during the installation attempt (see: https://documentation.meraki.com/SM/Other_Topics/Finding_Console_Logs_for_iOS_Troubleshooting ) you should be able to see an error you can then either take to Apple or search for to get you moving in the right direction.

Re: Apps will suddenly no longer install -- they install and delete themselves in 2 seconds...

I destroyed all the certs on my Enterprise account, and re-did them from scratch. Now my Enterprise apps are installing normally. I have no idea why that worked, but it did.

I had to get Apple involved, because somewhere along the line, my app IDs got associated with a "free" developer account somehow, and XCode wouldn't automatically sign my apps with the appropriate account -- only this "free" account, which I don't remember creating. Apple had to delete the app IDs from that "free" account and then XCode would finally sign them properly, using the proper, paid-for Enterprise account. It took Apple a couple of days to do that...

Anyway, all I can tell you is that it was definitely a certificate issue. There is no logical reason for this cert issue to crop up -- the certs didn't expire for a couple of months. But deleting all my certs, and all my provisioning profiles fixed the problem for me.